When the Y2K changeover was said and done, more was actually said than done.
Across the country, computer administrators wiled away the final hours of 1999 watching over computer systems and waiting for a catastrophe that never came.
In fact, those computer systems are now considered better off than they were before the Y2K Bug scare.
At the University, emergency management officials were surprised by the smooth transition.
“It was a total and complete non-event,” said Judson Freed, deputy director of emergency management.
Freed said they expected no major problems but were shocked when nothing at all went wrong.
“Our preparation and planning was thorough, and we missed very little,” he said of the University’s estimated $5.8 million spent on Y2K prevention.
The University’s reaction was on par with the rest of the country. Businesses, banks, colleges and everyday citizens across the nation weathered the would-be crisis with no more glitches than any other night of the year.
At the City University of New York, the biggest scare of the night came from the 10-year-old son of an emergency management official. The boy reached out to the mainframe computer and asked, “What’s this switch for?”
“I almost had a heart attack,” said Michael Ribaudo, dean for instructional technology and information systems. “That was about as bad as it got.”
Freed said he was scheduled to work from 6 p.m. Dec. 31 to 6 a.m. Jan. 1, but there were so few problems he was able to leave by 3:30 a.m.
Emergency management had set up a hotline for people to report Y2K-related problems, but even that went virtually unused, he said.
“We received 50 or 60 calls,” Freed said. “But they were all from people who were just checking to see if the hotline was still up and running.”
Now that the dust has settled, Freed said the University was better off than before its Y2K preparations.
“People who had not been backing up their data did so,” Freed said. “We have a stronger computer infrastructure than we had before.”
Computer and network upgrades that were performed to avoid Y2K-related problems have brought the University more up to date.
That sentiment was echoed across the country as officials found that the nearly $100 billion spent nationally to fix the problem was not wasted.
Defense Department officials said nearly half of that was spent on maintenance and upgrades that should have been done earlier but were postponed for one reason or another.
Freed said he is not worried about future Y2K-related problems. He said there will be some minor glitches, but nothing drastic is likely to happen.
“Ninety-nine percent of it is past us,” Freed said. “The worst is over.
“A lot of time and effort from a lot of people went into fixing this, and I am unbelievably pleased with the way things turned out.”

— The Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Chronicle of Higher Education contributed to this report.

Mike Wereschagin welcomes comments at [email protected]. He can also be reached at (612) 627-4070 x3226.